Roman Polanski added to Cannes 2017 line-up

The organisers of the Cannes Film Festival have added a number of films to the various strands of the official selection for next month’s event.

The highest profile among the additions is Paris-based Roman Polanski’s new French-language thriller Based on a True Story, about an author, who gets involved with an obsessive admirer. It stars Eva Green and is co-written by Cannes regular, Olivier Assayas. Polanski himself won the Palme d’Or for The Pianist and has had two other films in competition. This year, his film will be screening Out of Competition.

The one additional competition entry is from Sweden’s Ruben Östlund, whose Oscar-nominated Force Majeure won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes, three years ago. This year, he features in the main competition with The Square, an English-language satire starring Dominic West and Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss.

There are two new entries to the Un Certain Regard contest; Li Ruijun’s Walking Past the Future and La Cordillera by Santiago Mitre, who won the Critic’s Week strand in 2015.

There’ll also be Special Screenings of Barbet Schroeder’s new Burma documentary Le Vénérable W, which is billed as the third film of his “trilogy of evil” series, and Eric Caravaca’s Carré 35.

Other highlights of the programme include a screening of the latest from from the veteran French director André Téchiné, Nos Années Folles, and an event on the Beach, involving both a concert and the film Djam, by Tony Gatlif.

The organisers have also added a Children’s Screening of Arthur de Pins and Alexis Ducord’s animation, Zombillénium.

The latest additions to this year’s Cannes programme, as might be expected, include largely directors who’ve won awards at one of the various strands of competition in Cannes in earlier years and film-makers working in French.